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Contents

December 20, 2007 • Volume 54, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

Simon Leys is the pen name of the literary critic, essayist, historical novelist, and eminent sinologist Pierre Ryckmans. Born in Belgium in 1935, he settled in Australia in 1970 and was a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. His works include Chinese Shadows (1977), The Death of Napoleon (1991), a new translation of the Analects of Confucius (1997), and The Angel and the Octopus (1999). A fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a member of the Académie Royale de Littérature Française (Belgium), he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino del Duca in 2004.

Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979 cofounder with the late Edmund Wilson of the Library of America. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books. Among his many awards are the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Curtis Benjamin Award given by the American Association of Publishers for enriching the world of books.
 (February 2011)

Andrew Butterfield is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. His books include The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio and Body and Soul: Masterpieces of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture.
 (December 2012)

Christian Caryl is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and the Editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab website.
 His book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century was published in April 2013.

John Updike (1932–2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death. His major work was the set of four novels chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit: Angstrom, he two of which, Rabbit is Richand Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.

Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East.
 (May 2013)

Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels and two collections of stories. His play, The Testament of Mary, is now being staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

Tim Flannery is Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney. His book Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific will be published this month. (November 2012)

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His study of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was published in February 2013.

Anthony Lewis, a former columnist for The New York Times, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.

Michael Dirda, a weekly book columnist for The Washington Post, received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and Classics for Pleasure. His most recent book, On Conan Doyle, received a 2012 Edgar Award for best critical/biographical work of the year.
 Dirda graduated with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature (medieval studies and European romanticism) from Cornell University. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the online Barnes & Noble Review, and several other periodicals, as well as a frequent lecturer and an occasional college teacher.

Colin Jones is a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London and President of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author of Paris: Biography of a City. (May 2010)

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s recent works include Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.

Madison Smartt Bell is Professor of English and Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College. His new book, DevilA?s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest, is forthcoming in November. (October 2009)

Richard J. Evans is Regius Professor of History and president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Third Reich at War.

Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. (December 2012)

Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.

John Terborgh, who has worked in the Peruvian Amazon since 1973, is Research Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke and Director of its Center for Tropical Conservation. His latest book, co-edited with James A. Estes, is Trophic Cascades: Predators, Prey, and the Changing Dynamics of Nature.
 (April 2012)

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet and of the forthcoming Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist.. He is also the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that has been actively involved in the fight against natural gas fracking.

Francisco Goldman is the author of four novels, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, The Divine Husband, the forthcoming Say Her Name, and one work of nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder.

Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, is President of the Open Society Institute. He is the author of Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.

Jorie Graham is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Her book Sea Change: Poems will be published next spring. (December 2007)